Forbes Magazine is a bastion of content; data rich, insightful and often full of actionable information for the business world. Their single copy sales rose 4.3% in the first half of this year, during a period that saw their competitors’ sales slump by 15%. “Clearly,” according to Forbes’ Lewis DVorkin, “we’re bucking a trend.”
What’s the secret of their success?
While DVorkin is quick to point out that correlation is not causation, there does seem to be a strong connection between Forbes Magazine and the success of Forbes.com in the digital realm.
“Last month, Forbes.com had a record 31.5 million unique visitors, as measured by Omniture. That was up from 18.5 million a year earlier,” says DVorkin. Their writers churn out an impressive 400 posts a day across several business verticals, and they constantly share on social networks.
The key, according to DVorkin, lies in their ability to create personal brands around their writers’ areas of expertise and leverage the distribution power of those personal and professional networks. That success, to be sure, comes only after creating content that is the right “quality, quantity and variety” to appeal to such a huge number of fans.
Forbes remains a powerhouse of information, linked to by nearly 90,000 websites just last month. This kind of digital clout is the stuff of legends. Forbes gets it, and the effort is paying off for their bottom line.